Tag: mint

Mint Eggs

I use Mint for tracking my website visitors (all 3 of you) and it’s pretty fascinating to see the searches that bring people here, people from all over the globe. However I’ve only just realised that there are a number of commands, mostly hidden I think, that allow you to dig into Mint just that little bit more.

Peppermint Tea, a site that pulls together all the latest peppers for Mint has a list of the known commands. Errors and benchmarks are particularly handy for those misbehaving peppers. However it’s the Easter Eggs I loved.

Mint

I’m sure someone will see it as a waste of code and that more time should be spent fixing bugs…..pah! Give me an Easter Egg any day. Anyway, some interesting stats for this site. Internet Explorer visits have dropped to 53% with IE7 making up 60% of that total. Firefox is still slowly gaining at 37% and since moving to the Mac Safari has moved from 2% to a whopping 5% – none of that is me by the way. One stat that hasn’t changed is operating systems though – Windows users still makes up the vast majority of visitors at 89%, Mac with 10% and Linux with 1%. I guess that reflects reality pretty well.

The biggest surprise is how many visits are from users with small’ish screens. 1024*768 is the res for 43% of visitors, with 1280*1024 coming in second on 30% although the top stat is reducing quite quickly over time. Maybe I was a bit quick to move to a wider theme?

Final stat’s – 44% of visitors are from the UK, PSP Warez is the most common search and GTA Liberty City Stories – Custom Soundtracks is the most visited post.

Site Stats

I’ve been wanting to have some sort of site monitor tool for a while. One that will tell me who’s visiting the site and when and some other bits and pieces about their visit. Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been trying two out – Delineate and Mint. The most obvious difference is that Delineate is free (for the moment – it is in beta) and Mint costs $30.

Delineate Visitor LocationsDelineate is accessed remotely from your webspace. The information is presented clearly and with a lot of depth. For example you can see all the visitors to your site, the browser and OS they used and which specific page they visited. The site also makes good use of Google Maps to try and map their location. A nice feature is the last 100 visitors to your site mapped – good to see it really is a world wide web. If you wonder why they visit you can also see the search terms used to find your site. I really like this app although I’m not so sure about accessing another web app remotely – would prefer to host and see the stats local to my site.

Mint - SparksMint falls into that category. Once you’ve paid your $30 you download the app and install on your host site. One limitation is that the $30 only covers one domain name – if you mange other sites and want to use Mint it’s $30 per site – pretty steep. Once installed and configured the beauty of the website really hits home. Fast and configurable the layout will adapt to whatever browser size you use as long as it’s not IE – Mint doesn’t like IE at all. Out the box Mint has as much information as Delineate. However Mint is expandable via the Pepper API. This allows other dev’s to code small add-ons to Mint, for example Outclicks which monitors outgoing clicks from your site and XXX Strong Mint which displays visitors IP address. Nice.

Although costing $30, Mint wins hands down. I love it’s expandability and the fact that it’s hosted locally. I’m also surprised by some of the results so far. 74% of visitors are still using IE. Most shocking 66% are using a res less than 1280×1024. Nevermind – get Mint – thoroughly recommended. If your not fussed about expandability and hosting remotely then save $30 and go for Delineate instead.